Rasmus writes: > The "nifty trick" part of that seems to have become the story, and them injecting a "just" in front it of it makes it sound more derogatory. A

Rasmus writes: > The "nifty trick" part of that seems to have become the story, and them injecting a "just" in front it of it makes it sound more derogatory. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a big fan of nifty tricks that solve the problem. When I first heard about the Facebook effort I was assuming they were writing a JIT based on LLVM V8 or something along those lines. Writing a good JIT is hard. Doing static code analysis and generating compilable C++ from it is indeed a nifty trick. It's not "just" a nifty trick, it is a cool trick that takes advantage of a number of characteristics of PHP. The main one being that you can't overload PHP functions. strlen() is always strlen, for example. In Python, this would be harder because you can overload everything. > I also noted that most sites on the Web have a lot of lower hanging fruit that would provide a much bigger performance improvement, if fixed, than doubling the speed of the PHP execution phase. The ReadWriteWeb site, for example, needs 160 separate HTTP requests and 41 distinct DNS lookups to load the front page. And once you get beyond the frontend inefficiencies you usually find Database issues, inefficient system call issues and general architecture problems that again aren't solved by speeding up PHP execution.